Stephen C. Coates tackles the oft-told story of David and Bathsheba and poses a question: What if this wasn’t a tale of lust and betrayal, but rather a consensual encounter that led to a power couple who changed the course of biblical history?

In Sunrise in Gihon: Revisiting David and Bathsheba, the cast is unchanged, but personalities differ from their representations in the Old Testament. While David’s basic nature remains the same, this iteration takes the aging king and imbues him with less debauchery and more of a sense of care for his legacy. He finds a clever partner in Bathsheba, who, rather than being a helpless victim, is shrewd and more than capable of being a partner in his plans.

Coates is not shy about his goal in this work, and in the introduction, he immediately advances the notion that biblical narratives are skewed to patriarchy, and that women are woefully underrepresented. For example, he gender-swaps Zarah, twin of Judah’s son Perez, into a woman. This allows Coates to assert that while Perez was the key link in the lineage of Jesus Christ, it was the female descendants of Zarah that provided the feminine energy that was critical in that genealogy.

Historical fiction can fall into a trap of anachronisms and Coates does so here, taking readers out of the story. For example, he refers to the “Transjordan” (a geographical term not coined until the 20th century), and he also gives numerical references to biblical books (ex., I Chronicles 2:18-19) when the Bible was not divided into chapter and verse for decades after these accounts were put into writing.

Nonetheless, the author has provided an intriguing, speculative take on a familiar story, and fans of period pieces set in biblical times should enjoy it.

Also available in ebook.